Obama slams auto executives

In a wide-ranging, hour-long interview scheduled to air Wednesday night, President-elect Barack Obama sat down with Barbara Walters and discussed the auto industry, Afghanistan, his family's Thanksgiving plans and his desire to break out of the White House bubble.

Snippets of the interview, which airs tonight at 10 Eastern on ABC, were also scheduled to appear on "Good Morning America" and "World News Tonight."

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He slammed auto executives, who flew to Washington in private jets to ask for a bailout, for being "tone deaf" and stressed corporate and civic responsibility in the face of a crumbling economy.

Executives, he said, should forgo their bonuses.

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"That's an example of taking responsibility. I think that if you are already worth tens of millions of dollars, and you are having to lay off workers, the least you can do is say, 'I'm willing to make some sacrifice as well, because I recognize that there are people who are a lot less well off who are going through some pretty tough times,'" the president-elect added.

Recalling his time on the campaign trail and the stories he heard and people he met, Obama said he is trying to figure out how to keep that contact going at the White House. There have been talks that the president-elect would have to give up his BlackBerry once he becomes president because of security concerns.

"One of the things that I'm going to have to work through is how to break through the isolation — the bubble that exists around the president. I'm in the process of negotiating with the Secret Service, with lawyers, with White House staff ... to figure out how can I get information from outside of the 10 or 12 people who surround my office in the White House," he said.

"One of the worst things I think that could happen to a president is losing touch with what people are going through day to day," he said. "I want to make sure that I keep my finger on the pulse of the struggles that people are going through every day."